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GEORGE DU MAURIER

From an unpublished photograph by Fradelle and Young, London.

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SOCIAL
PICTORIAL
S AT I R E

Reminiscences and Apprecia-
tions of English Illustrators
of the Past Generation. By
GEORGE du MAURIER

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

1898

By GEORGE du MAURIER.

PETER IBBETSON. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth,

$i 50.
TRILBY. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, $1 75.
THE MARTIAN. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, $1 75.
A LEGEND OF CAMELOT. Pictures and Verses.

Illustrated. Large 4to, Cloth, $5 00.
ENGLISH SOCIETY. Illustrated. Oblong 4to,

Cloth, $2 50.

NEW YORK AND LONDON '.
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS.

THE LIBRARY

fiRIGHAM YOUNG U: IV^RIITV

PROVO, UTAH

ILLUSTRATIONS

GEORGE DU MAURIER Frontispiece

JOHN LEECH Fac

A SPECIMEN OF PLUCK

ONE OF MR. BRIGGS'S ADVENTURES

IN THE HIGHLANDS

MR. AND MRS. CAUDLE

"IN THE BAY OF BISCAY O" . . .
"THE JOLLY LITTLE STREET ARABS "
THANK GOODNESS ! FLY-FISHING HAS

BEGUN!

DOING A LITTLE BUSINESS . .
A TOLERABLY BROAD HINT . .
CHARLES KEENE .....
THE SNOWSTORM, JAN. 2, 1867
WAITING FOR THE LANDLORD!
"NONE O' YOUR LARKS " . .
A STROKE OF BUSINESS . . .
AN AFFRONT TO THE SERVICE

6
10

14
22
26
32

38
42
46

54
58
62

68
72

ILLUSTRATIONS

"NOT UP TO HIS BUSINESS"
FELINE AMENITIES . . .
A PICTORIAL PUZZLE . . .
THE NEW SOCIETY CRAZE .
"READING WITHOUT TEARS "
REFINEMENTS OF MODERN SPEECH
THINGS ONE WOULD WISH TO HAVE

EXPRESSED DIFFERENTLY
THE HEIGHT OF IMPROPRIETY

Facing p.

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SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

It is my purpose to speak of the
craft to which I have devoted the best
years of my life, the craft of portraying,
by means of little pen-and-ink strokes,
lines and scratches, a small portion of
the world in which we live ; such social
and domestic incidents as lend them-
selves to humorous or satirical treat-
ment; the illustrated criticism of life,
of the life of our time and country, in
its lighter aspects.

The fact that I have spent so many
years in the practice of this craft does
not of itself, I am well aware, entitle
me to lay down the law about it ; the

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

mere exercise of an art so patent to all,
so easily understanded of the people,
does not give one any special insight
into its simple mysteries, beyond a cer-
tain perception and appreciation of the
technical means by which it is pro-
duced— unless one is gifted with the
critical faculty, a gift apart, to the pos-
session of which I make no claim.

There are two kinds of critics of such
work as ours. First there is the wide
public for whom we work and by whom
we are paid ; " who lives to please must
please to live ;" and who lives by draw-
ing for a comic periodical must man-
age to please the greater number. The
judgment of this critic, though often
sound, is not infallible ; but his verdict
for the time being is final, and by it we,
who live by our wits and from hand to
mouth, must either stand or fall.

The other critic is the expert, our fel-
2

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

low-craftsman, who has learned by initia-
tion, apprenticeship, and long practice
the simple secrets of our common trade.
He is not quite infallible either, and is
apt to concern himself more about the
manner than the matter of our perform-
ance; nor is he of immediate importance,
since with the public on our side we can
do without him for a while, and flourish
like a green bay-tree in spite of his artistic
disapproval of our work ; but he is not to
be despised, for he is some years in ad-
vance of that other critic, the public, who
may, and probably will, come round to
his way of thinking in time.

The first of these two critics is typified
by Moliere's famous cook, who must
have been a singularly honest, indepen-
dent, and intelligent person, since he
chose in all cases to abide by her deci-
sion, and not with an altogether unsatis-
factory result to Mankind ! Such cooks

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

are not to be found in these days — cer-
tainly not in England ; but he is an un-
lucky craftsman who does not possess
some such natural critics in his family,
his home, or near it — mother, sister,
friend, wife, or child — who will look over
his shoulder at his little sketch, and say :

" Tommy [or Papa, or Grandpapa, as
the case may be], that person you've
just drawn doesn't look quite natural,"
or:

" That lady is not properly dressed for
the person you want her to be — those
hats are not worn this year," and so
forth and so forth.

When you have thoroughly satisfied
this household critic, then is the time to
show some handy brother craftsman
your amended work, and listen grateful-
ly when he suggests that you should put
a tone on this wall, and a tree, or some-
thing, in the left middle distance to
4

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

balance the composition ; and raise or
depress the horizon-line to get a better
effect of perspective.

In speaking of some of my fellow-art-
ists on Punch, and of their work, I shall
try and bring both these critical meth-
ods into play — premising, however, once
for all, that such criticism on my part is
simply the expression of my individual
taste or fancy, the taste or fancy of one
who by no means pretends to the un-
erring acumen of Moliere's cook, on the
one hand, and who feels himself by no
means infallible in his judgment of pure-
ly technical matters, on the other. I can
only admire and say why, or why I
don't; and if I fail in making you ad-
mire and disadmire with me, it will
most likely be my fault as well as my
misfortune.

I had originally proposed to treat of
Richard Doyle, John Leech, and Charles

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

Keene — and finally of myself, since that
I should speak of myself was rather in-
sisted upon by those who procured me
the honor of speaking at all. I find,
however, that there is so much to say
about Leech and Keene that I have
thought it better to sacrifice Richard
Doyle, who belongs to a remoter period,
and whose work, exquisite as it is of its
kind, is so much slighter than theirs,
and fills so much less of the public eye ;
for his connection with Punch did not
last long. Moreover, personally I knew
less of him ; just enough to find that to
know was to love him — a happy peculi-
arity he shared with his two great col-
laborators on Punch.

John Leech ! What a name that was
to conjure with, and is still !

I cannot find words to express what it
represented to me of pure unmixed de-
light in my youth and boyhood, long
6

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

before I ever dreamed of being an artist
myself ! It stands out of the past with
such names as Dickens, Dumas, Byron
— not indeed that I am claiming for him
an equal rank with those immortals, who
wielded a weapon so much more potent
than a mere caricaturist's pencil ! But
if an artist's fame is to be measured by
the mere quantity and quality of the
pleasure he has given, what pinnacle is
too high for John Leech !

Other men have drawn better; deeper,
grander, nobler, more poetical themes
have employed more accomplished pen-
cils, even in black and white; but for
making one glad, I can think of no one
to beat him.

To be an apparently hopeless invalid
at Christmas-time in some dreary, de-
serted, dismal little Flemish town and to
receive Puncfts Almanac (for 1858, let us
say) from some good-natured friend in
7

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

England — that is a thing not to be for-
gotten! I little dreamed then that I
should come to London again, and meet
John Leech and become his friend ; that
I should be, alas ! the last man to shake
hands with him before his death (as I
believe I was), and find myself among
the officially invited mourners by his
grave ; and, finally, that I should inherit,
and fill for so many years (however in-
differently), that half-page in Punch op-
posite the political cartoon, and which
I had loved so well when he was the
artist !

Well, I recovered from a long and dis-
tressing ailment of my sight which had
been pronounced incurable, and came to
England, where I was introduced to
Charles Keene, with whom I quickly
became intimate, and it was he who pre-
sented me to Leech one night at one
of Mr. Arthur Lewis's smoking concerts,

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

in the winter of i860. I remember feel-
ing somewhat nervous lest he should
take me for a foreigner on account of
my name, and rather unnecessarily went
out of my way to assure him that I was
rather more English than John Bull him-
self. It didn't matter in the least; I
have no doubt he saw through it all ; he
was kindness and courtesy itself ; and I
experienced to the full that emotion so
delightful to a young hero-worshipper
in meeting face to face a world-wide
celebrity whom he has long worshipped
at a distance. In the words of Lord

Tennyson :

" I was rapt
By all the sweet and sudden passion of youth
Towards greatness in its elder." . . .

But it so happened at just this particular
period of his artistic career and of mine
that he no longer shone as a solitary
star of the first magnitude in my little
9

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

firmament of pictorial social satire. A
new impulse had been given to the art
of drawing on wood, a new school had
been founded, and new methods — to
draw straight from nature instead of
trusting to memory and imagination —
had been the artistic order of the day.
Men and women, horses and dogs, land-
scapes and seascapes, all one can make
pictures of, even chairs and tables and
teacups and saucers, must be studied
from the life — from the still-life, if you
will — by whoever aspired to draw on
wood; even angels and demons and
cherubs and centaurs and mermaids must
be closely imitated from nature — or at
least as much of them as could be got
from the living model.

Once a Week had just appeared, and
The Cornhill Magazine. Sir John Mil-
lais and Sir Frederick Leighton were
then drawing on wood just like the or-

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SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

dinary mortals; Frederick Walker had
just started on his brief but splendid
career; Frederick Sandys had burst on
the black-and-white world like a meteor ;
and Charles Keene, who was illustrating
the Cloister and the Hearth in the inter-
vals of his Punch work, had, after long
and patient labor, attained that consum-
mate mastery of line and effect in wood
draughtsmanship that will be forever
associated with his name ; and his work
in Punchy if only by virtue of its extraor-
dinary technical ability, made Leech's
by contrast appear slight and almost
amateurish in spite of its ease and bold-
ness.

So that with all my admiration for
Leech it was at the feet of Charles
Keene that I found myself sitting ; be-
sides which we were much together in
those days, talking endless shop, taking
long walks, riding side by side on the
ii

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

knife-boards of omnibuses, dining at
cheap restaurants, making music at each
other's studios. His personal charm was
great, as great in its way as Leech's ; he
was democratic and so was I, as one is
bound to be when one is impecunious
and the world is one's oyster to open
with the fragile point of a lead-pencil.
His bohemian world was mine — and I
found it a very good world and very
much to my taste — a clear, honest,
wholesome, innocent, intellectual, and
most industrious British bohemia, with
lots of tobacco, lots of good music,
plenty of talk about literature and art,
and not too much victuals or drink.
Many of its denizens, that were, have
become Royal Academicians or have
risen to fame in other ways; some have
had to take a back seat in life; surpris-
ingly few have gone to the bad.

This world, naturally, was not Leech's,

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

if it had ever been, I doubt ; his bohemia,
if he ever had lived in one, had been the
bohemia of medicine, not of art, and he
seemed to us then to be living on social
heights of fame and sport and aristo-
cratic splendor where none of us dreamed
of seeking him — and he did not seek us.
We hated and despised the bloated aris-
tocracy, just as he hated and despised
foreigners without knowing much about
them ; and the aristocracy, to do it jus-
tice, did not pester us with its obtrusive
advances. But I never heard Leech
spoken of otherwise in bohemia than
with affectionate admiration, although
many of us seemed to think that his best
work was done. Indeed, his work was
becoming somewhat fitful in quality, and
already showed occasional signs of haste
and illness and fatigue ; his fun was less
genial and happy, though he drew more
vigorously than ever, and now and again
13

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

surprised us by surpassing himself, as in
his series of Briggs in the Highlands a-
chasing the deer.

All that was thirty years ago and
more. I may say at once that I have
reconsidered the opinion I formed of
John Leech at that time. Leech, it is
true, is by no means the one bright par-
ticular star, but he has recovered much
of his lost first magnitude ; if he shines
more by what he has to say than by his
manner of saying it, I have come to
think that that is the best thing of the
two to shine by, if you cannot shine by
both ; and I find that his manner was
absolutely what it should have been for
his purpose and his time — neither more
nor less ; he had so much to say and of
a kind so delightful that I have no
time to pick holes in his mode of ex-
pression, which at its best has satisfied
far more discriminating experts than I ;
14

•D o

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

besides which, the methods of printing
and engraving have wonderfully im-
proved since his day. He drew straight
on the wood block, with a lead-pencil ;
his delicate gray lines had to be trans-
lated into the uncompromising coarse
black lines of printers' ink — a ruinous
process ; and what his work lost in this
way is only to be estimated by those
who know. True, his mode of expres-
sion was not equal to Keene's — I never
knew any that was, in England, or even
approached it — but that, as Mr. Rud-
yard Kipling says, is another story.

The story that I will tell now is that
of my brief acquaintance with Leech,
which began in i860, and which I had
not many opportunities of improving
till I met him at Whitby in the autumn
of 1864 — a memorable autumn for me,
since I used to forgather with him every
day, and have long walks and talks with
15

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

him — and dined with him once or twice
at the lodgings where he was staying
with his wife and son and daughter — all
of whom are now dead. He was the
most sympathetic, engaging, and attrac-
tive person I ever met ; not funny at all
in conversation, or ever wishing to be —
except now and then for a capital story,
which he told in perfection.

The key-note of his character, socially,
seemed to be self-effacement, high-bred
courtesy, never-failing consideration for
others. He was the most charming com-
panion conceivable, having intimately
known so many important and celebrat-
ed people, and liking to speak of them ;
but one would never have guessed from
anything he ever looked or said that he
had made a whole nation, male and fe-
male, gentle and simple, old and young,
laugh as it had never laughed before or
since, for a quarter of a century.
16

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

He was tall, thin, and graceful, ex-
tremely handsome, of the higher Irish
type ; with dark hair and whiskers and
complexion, and very light grayish-blue
eyes ; but the expression of his face was
habitually sad, even when he smiled. In
dress, bearing, manner, and aspect he
was the very type of the well-bred Eng-
lish gentleman and man of the world
and good society ; I never met any one
to beat him in that peculiar distinction
of form, which, I think, has reached its
highest European development in this
country. I am told the Orientals are
still our superiors in deportment. But
the natural man in him was still the
best. Thackeray and Sir John Millais,
not bad judges, and men with many
friends, have both said that they per-
sonally loved John Leech better than
any man they ever knew.

At this time he was painting in oil,

B 17

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

and on an enlarged scale, some of his
more specially popular sketches in Punch,
and very anxious to succeed with them,
but nervously diffident of success with
them, even with ol ttoWoL He was not
at his happiest in these efforts ; and
there was something pathetic in his ear-
nestness and perseverance in attempting
a thing so many can do, but which he
could not do for want of a better train-
ing ; while he could do the inimitable so
easily.

I came back to town before Leech,
and did not see him again until the fol-
lowing October. On Saturday afternoon,
the 28th, I called at his house, No. 6
The Terrace, Kensington, with a very
elaborate drawing in pencil by myself,
which I presented to him as a souvenir,
and with which he seemed much pleased.

He was already working at the Punch
Almanac for '65, at a window on the
18

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

second floor overlooking the street. (I
have often gazed up at it since.) He
seemed very ill, so sad and depressed
that I could scarcely speak to him for
sheer sympathy ; I felt he would never
get through the labor of that almanac,
and left him with the most melancholy
forebodings.

Monday morning the papers an-
nounced his death on Sunday, October
29th, from angina pectoris, the very
morning after I had seen him.

I was invited by Messrs. Bradbury and
Evans, the publishers of Punch, to the
funeral, which took place at Kensal
Green. It was the most touching sight
imaginable. The grave was near Thack-
eray's, who had died the year before.
There were crowds of people, Charles
Dickens among them ; Canon Hole, a
great friend of Leech's and who has
written most affectionately about him,
19

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

read the service ; and when the coffin
was lowered into the grave, John Millais
burst into tears and loud sobs, setting an
example that was followed all round ;
we all forgot our manhood and cried like
women ! I can recall no funeral in my
time where simple grief and affection
have been so openly and spontaneously
displayed by so many strangers as well
as friends — not even in France, where
people are more demonstrative than
here. No burial in Westminster Abbey
that I have ever seen ever gave such an
impression of universal honor, love, and
regret.

" Whom the gods love die young."
He was only forty-six !

I was then invited to join the Punch
staff and take Leech's empty chair at
the weekly dinner — and bidden to cut
my initials on the table, by his; his
monogram as it was carved by him is
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SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

J. L. under a leech in a bottle, dated
1854; and close by on the same board
are the initials W. M. T.

I flatter myself that convivially, at
least, my small D. M., carved in impene-
trable oak, will go down to posterity in
rather distinguished company !

If ever there was a square English
hole, and a square English peg to fit it,
that hole was Punch, and that peg was
John Leech. He was John Bull himself,
but John Bull refined and civilized —
John Bull polite, modest, gentle — full of
self-respect and self-restraint ; and with
all the bully softened out of him ; manly
first and gentlemanly after, but very
soon after; more at home perhaps in
the club, the drawing-room, and the
hunting-field, in Piccadilly and the Park,
than in the farm or shop or market-place ;
a normal Englishman of the upper
middle class, with but one thing abnor-
21

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

mal about him, viz., his genius, which
was of the kind to give the greater pleas-
ure to the greater number — and yet
delight the most fastidious of his day —
and I think of ours. One must be very
ultra-aesthetic, even now, not to feel his
charm.

He was all of a piece, and moved and
worked with absolute ease, freedom, and
certainty, within the limits nature had
assigned him — and his field was a very
large one. He saw and represented the
whole panorama of life that came within
his immediate ken with an unwavering
consistency, from first to last ; from a
broadly humorous, though mostly sym-
pathetic point of view that never
changed — a very delightful point of
view, if not the highest conceivable.

Hand and eye worked with brain in
singular harmony, and all three im-
proved together contemporaneously,

W \ .UTS

CAD >>LE

From the original drawing by John Leech.
In the possession of John Kendhick Bangs, Esq.

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

with a parallelism most interesting to
note, as one goes through the long series
of his social pictures from the beginning.

He has no doubts or hesitations — no
bewildering subtleties — no seeking from
twelve to fourteen o'clock — either in
his ideas or technique, which very soon
becomes an excellent technique, thor-
oughly suited to his ideas — rapid, bold,
spirited, full of color, breadth, and move-
ment— troubling itself little about details
that will not help the telling of his story
— for before everything else he has his
story to tell, and it must either make
you laugh or lightly charm you — and he
tells it in the quickest, simplest, down-
rightest pencil strokes, although it is
often a complicated story!

For there are not only the funny peo-
ple and the pretty people acting out
their little drama in the foreground —
there is the scene in which they act, and
23

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

the middle distance, and the background
beyond, and the sky itself ; beautiful
rough landscapes and seascapes and
skyscapes, winds and weathers, boister-
ous or sunny seas, rain and storm and
cloud — all the poetry of nature, that he
feels most acutely while his little people
are being so unconsciously droll in the
midst of it all. He is a king of impres-
sionists, and his impression becomes
ours on the spot — never to be forgotten !
It is all so quick and fresh and strong,
so simple, pat, and complete, so direct
from mother Nature herself! It has
about it the quality of inevitableness —
those are the very people who would
have acted and spoken in just that man-
ner, and we meet them every day — the
expression of the face, the movement
and gesture, in anger, terror, dismay,
scorn, conceit, tenderness, elation, tri-
umph. . . . Whatever the mood they
24

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

could not have looked or acted other-
wise— it is life itself. An optimistic life
in which joyousness prevails, and the
very woes and discomfitures are broadly
comical to us who look on — like some
one who has seasickness, or a headache
after a Greenwich banquet — which are
about the most tragic things he has
dealt with.

(I am speaking of his purely social
sketches. For in his admirable large
cuts, political and otherwise serious, his
satire is often bitter and biting indeed ;
and his tragedy almost Hogarthian.)

Like many true humorists he was of
a melancholy temperament, and no
doubt felt attracted by all that was
mirthful and bright, and in happy con-
trast to his habitual mood. Seldom if
ever, does a drop of his inner sadness
ooze out through his pencil point — and
never a drop of gall ; and I do not re-
25

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

member one cynical touch in his whole
series.

In his tastes and habits he was by
nature aristocratic ; he liked the society
of those who were well dressed, well
bred and refined like himself, and per-
haps a trifle conventional ; he conformed
quite spontaneously and without effort
to upper-class British ideal of his time,
and had its likes and dislikes. But his
strongest predilections of all are com-
mon to the British race : his love of
home, his love of sport, his love of the
horse and the hound — especially his love
of the pretty woman — the pretty woman
of the normal, wholesome English type.
This charming creature so dear to us all
pervades his show from beginning to
end — she is a creation of his and he
thoroughly loves her, and draws her
again and again with a fondness that is
half lover-like and half paternal — her
26

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SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

buxom figure, her merry bright eyes
and fresh complexion and flowing ring-
lets, and pursed -up lips like Cupid's
bow. Nor is he ever tired of displaying
her feet and ankles (and a little more)
in gales of wind on cliff and pier and
parade — or climbing the Malvern Hills.
When she puts on goloshes it nearly
breaks his heart, and he would fly to
other climes ! He revels in her infantile
pouts and jealousies and heart-burnings
and butterfly delights and lisping mis-
chiefs ; her mild, innocent flirtations with
beautiful young swells, whose cares are
equally light.

She is a darling, and he constantly
calls her so to her face. Her favorite
sea-side nook becomes the mermaid's
haunt ; her back hair flies and dries in
the wind, and disturbs the peace of the
too susceptible Punch. She is a little
amazon pour rire, and rides across coun-
27

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

try, and drives (even a hansom sometimes,
with a pair of magnificent young whis-
kerandoes smoking their costly cigars
inside); she is a toxophilite, and her ar-
row sticks, for it is barbed with innocent
seduction, and her bull's-eye is the soft
military heart. She wears a cricket-cap
and breaks Aunt Sally's nose seven
times ; she puts her pretty little foot
upon the croquet-ball — and croquet'd
you are completely! With what glee
she would have rinked and tennised if
he had lived a little longer !

She is light of heart, and perhaps a
little of head ! Her worst trouble is
when the captain gives the wing of the
fowl to some other darling who might
be her twin sister; her most terrible
nightmare is when she dreams that great
stupid Captain Spravvler upsets a dish of
trifle over her new lace dress with the
blue satin slip ; but next morning she is
28

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

herself again, and rides in the Row, and
stops to speak with that great stupid
Captain Sprawler, who is very nice to
look at, whose back is very beautiful,
and who sprawls most gracefully over
the railings, and pays her those delight-
ful, absurd compliments about her and
her horse " being such a capital pair/'
while, as a foil to so much grace and
splendor, a poor little snub-nosed, ill-
dressed, ill-conditioned dwarf of a snob
looks on, sucking the top of his cheap
cane in abject admiration and hopeless
envy ! Then she pats and kisses the
nice soft nose of Cornet Flinders's hun-
ter, which is "deucedly aggravating for
Cornet Flinders, you know " — but when
that noble sportsman is frozen out and
cannot hunt, she plays scratch-cradle
with him in the boudoir of her father's
country-house, or pitches chocolate into
his mouth from the oak landing; and
29

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

she lets him fasten the skates on to her
pretty feet. Happy cornet ! And she
plays billiards with her handsome cousin

— a guardsman at least — and informs
him that she is just eighteen to his love

— and stands under the mistletoe and
asks this enviable relation of hers to
show her what the garroter's hug is like ;
and when he proceeds to do so she calls
out in distress because his pointed wax-
ed mustache has scratched her pretty
cheek, and when Mr. Punch is there, at
dinner, she and a sister darling pull
crackers across his august white waist-
coat, and scream in pretty terror at the
explosion ; to that worthy's excessive
jubilation, for Mr. Punch is Leech him-
self, and nothing she does can ever be
amiss in his eyes !

Sometimes, indeed, she is seriously
transfixed herself, and bids Mr. Tongs,
the hair-dresser, cut off a long lock of her
30

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

hair where it will not be missed — and
she looks so lovely under the smart of
Cupid's arrow that we are frantically
jealous of the irresistible warrior for
whom the jetty tress is destined. In
short, she is innocence and liveliness and
health incarnate — a human kitten.

When she marries the gilded youth
with the ambrosial whiskers, their honey-
mooning is like playing at being mar-
ried, their artless billings and cooings
are enchanting to see. She will have no
troubles — Leech will take good care of
that ; her matrimonial tiffs will be of the
slightest ; hers will be a well-regulated
household ; the course of her conjugal
love will run smooth in spite of her little
indiscretions — for like Bluebeard's wife
she can be curious at times, and coax
and wheedle to know the mysteries of
Freemasonry, and cry because Edwin
will not reveal the secret of Mr. Percy,
31

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

the horse -tamer; and how Edwin can
resist such an appeal is more than we
can understand ! But soon they will
have a large family, and live happy ever
after, and by the time their eldest-born
is thirteen years old, the darling of four-
teen years back will be a regular mater-
familias, stout, matronly, and rather
severe ; and Edwin will be fat, bald, and
middle-aged, and bring home a bundle
of asparagus and a nice new perambu-
lator to celebrate the wedding-day!

And he loves her brothers and cousins,
military or otherwise, just as dearly, and
makes them equally beautiful to the
eye, with those lovely drooping whiskers
that used to fall and brush their bosoms,
their smartly waistcoated bosoms, a
quarter of a century ago ! He dresses
them even better than the darlings, and
has none but the kindliest and gentlest
satire for their little vanities and conceits
32

f<i«^r

/XL C^t^c^feJ-,'

"THE JOLLY LITTLE STREET ARABS "
From the original drawing for Punch in possession of John Kendrick Bangs, Esq.

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

— for they have no real vices, these
charming youths, beyond smoking too
much and betting a little and getting
gracefully tipsy at race-meetings and
Greenwich dinners — and sometimes run-
ning into debt with their tailors, I sup-
pose! And then how boldly they ride
to hounds, and how splendidly they fight
in the Crimea ! how lightly they dance
at home ! How healthy, good-humored,
and manly they are, with all their va-
garies of dress and jewelry and accent !
It is easy to forgive them if they give
the whole of their minds to their white
neckties, or are dejected because they
have lost the little gridiron off their
chatelaine, or lose all presence of mind
when a smut settles on their noses, and
turn faint at the sight of Mrs. Gamp's
umbrella !

And next to these enviable beings he
loves and reveres the sportsman. One

C 33

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

is made to feel that the true sportsman,
whether he shoots or hunts or fishes, is
an august being, as he ought to be in
Great Britain, and Leech has done him
full justice with his pencil. He is no
subject for flippant satire ; so there he
sits his horse, or stalks through his tur-
nip-field, or handles his rod like a god !
Handsome, well-appointed from top to
toe, aristocratic to the finger-tips — a
most impressive figure, the despair of
foreigners, the envy of all outsiders at
home (including the present lecturer) !

He has never been painted like this
before ! What splendid lords and squires,
fat or lean, hook-nosed or eagle-eyed,
well tanned by sun and wind, in faultless
kit, on priceless mounts ! How redolent
they are of health and wealth, and the
secure consciousness of high social posi-
tion— of the cool business-like self-impor-
tance that sits so well on those who are

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

knowing in the noblest pursuit that can
ever employ the energies and engross
the mind of a well-born Briton ; for they
can ride almost as well as their grooms,
these mighty hunters before the Lord,
and know the country almost as well as
the huntsman himself ! And what sons
and grandsons and granddaughters are
growing up round them, on delightful
ponies no gate, hedge, or brook can
dismay — nothing but the hard high-
road !

It is a glorious, exhilarating scene,
with the beautiful wintry landscape
stretching away to the cloudy Novem-
ber sky, and the lords and ladies gay,
and the hounds, and the frosty- faced,
short-tempered old huntsman, the very
perfection of his kind ; and the poor
cockney snobs on their hired screws,
and the meek clod -hopping laborers
looking on excited and bewildered,
35

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

happy for a moment at beholding so
much happiness in their betters.

To have seen these sketches of the
hunting-field is to have been there in
person. It is almost the only hunting
that I ever had — and probably ever shall
have — and I am almost content that
it should be so ! It is so much easier
and simpler to draw for Punch than to
drive across country ! And then, as a
set-off to all this successful achievement,
this pride and pomp and circumstance
of glorious sport, we have the immortal
and ever-beloved figure of Mr. Briggs,
whom I look upon as Leech's master-
piece— the example above all others of
the most humorous and good-natured
satire that was ever penned or pencil-
led ; the more ridiculous he is the more
we love him ; he is more winning and
sympathetic than even Mr. Pickwick
himself, and I almost think a greater
36

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

creation ! Besides, it took two to make
Mr. Pickwick, the author and the artist.
Whereas Mr. Briggs issued fully equip-
ped from the brain of Leech alone !

Not indeed that all unauthorized gal-
lopers after the fox find forgiveness in
the eyes of Leech. Woe to the vulgar
little cockney snob who dares to ob-
trude his ugly mug and his big cigar and
his hired, broken-winded rip on these
hallowed and thrice -happy hunting-
grounds! — an earthen-ware pot among
vessels of brass; the punishment shall
be made to fit the crime ; better if he
fell off and his horse rolled over him
than that he should dress and ride and
look like that ! For the pain of broken
bones is easier to bear than the scorn of
a true British sportsman !

Then there are the fishermen who
never catch any fish, but whom no stress
of weather can daunt or distress. There

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

they sit or stand with the wind blowing
or the rain soaking, in dark landscapes
with ruffled streams and ominous
clouds, and swaying trees that turn up
the whites of their leaves — one almost
hears the wind rush through them. One
almost forgets the comical little forlorn
figure who gives such point to all the
angry turbulence of nature in the im-
pression produced by the mise en scene
itself — an impression so happily, so viv-
idly suggested by a few rapid, instruc-
tive pencil strokes and thumb smudges
that it haunts the memory like a dream.

He loves such open-air scenes so sin-
cerely, he knows so well how to express
and communicate the perennial charm
they have for him, that the veriest book-
worm becomes a sportsman through
sheer sympathy — by the mere fact of
looking at them.

And how many people and things he
38

THANK GOODNESS ! FLY-FISHING HAS BEGUN !

Miller. " Don't they really, perhaps they'll bite better
towards the cool of the evening, they mostly do."

—Punch, 1857.

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

loves that most of us love ! — it would
take all night to enumerate them — the
good authoritative pater and mater-
familias; the delightful little girls; the
charming cheeky school-boys ; the jolly
little street arabs, who fill old gentle-
men's letter-boxes with oyster-shells and
gooseberry-skins ; the cabmen, the 'bus-
men ; the policemen with the old-fashion-
ed chimney-pot hat ; the old bathing-
women, and Jack-ashores, and jolly old
tars — his British tar is irresistible, wheth-
er he is hooking a sixty - four pounder
out of the Black Sea, or riding a Turk,
or drinking tea instead of grog and com-
plaining of its strength ! There seems
to be hardly a mirthful corner of English
life that Leech has not seen and loved
and painted in this singularly genial and
optimistic manner.

His loves are many and his hates are
few — but he is a good hater all the same.

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

He hates Mawworm and Stiggins, and
so do we. He hates the foreigner whom
he does not know as heartily as Thack-
eray does, who seems to know him so
well — with a hatred that seems to me a
little unjust, perhaps ; all France is not
in Leicester Square ; many Frenchmen
can dress and ride, drive and shoot as
well as anybody ; and they began to use
the tub very soon after we did — a dozen
years or so, perhaps — say after the coup
d'ttat in 185 1.

Then he hates with a deadly hatred
all who make music in the street or next
door — and preach in the cross-ways and
bawl their wares on the parade. What
would he have said of the Salvation
Army? He is haunted by the bark of
his neighbor's dog, by the crow of his
neighbor's cochin-china cock ; he cannot
even bear his neighbor to have his chim-
ney swept ; and as for the Christmas
40

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

waits — we all remember that tragic pict-
ure ! This exaggerated aversion to
noises became a disease with him, and
possibly hastened his end.

Among his pet hates we must not for-
get the gorgeous flunky and the guzzling
alderman, the leering old fop, the ras-
cally book-maker, the sweating Jew
tradesman, and the poor little snob (the
'Any of his day) who tries vainly to
grow a mustache, and wears such a
shocking bad hat, and iron heels to his
shoes, and shuns the Park during the
riots for fear of being pelted for a
" haristocrat," and whose punishment I
think is almost in excess of his misde-
meanor. To succeed in overdressing
one's self (as his swells did occasionally
without marring their beauty) is almost
as ignominious as to fail ; and when the
failure comes from want of means, there
is also almost a pathetic side to it.
41

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

And he is a little bit hard on old
frumps, with fat ankles and scraggy
bosoms and red noses — but anyhow we
are made to laugh — quod erat demon-
strandum. We also know that he has
a strong objection to cold mutton for
dinner, and much prefers a whitebait
banquet at Greenwich, or a nice well-
ordered repast at the Star and Garter.
So do we.

And the only thing he feared is the
horse. Nimrod as he is, and the happiest
illustrator of the hunting-field that ever
was, he seems forever haunted by a
terror of the heels of that noble animal
he drew so well — and I thoroughly sym-
pathize with him !

In all the series the chief note is joy-
ousness, high spirits, the pleasure of
being alive. There is no Weltschmerz in
his happy world, where all is for the best
— no hankering after the moon, no dis-
42

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SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

content with the present order of things.
Only one little lady discovers that the
world is hollow, and her doll is stuffed
with bran ; only one gorgeous swell has
exhausted the possibilites of this life,
and finds out that he is at loss for a new
sensation. So what does he do? Cut
his throat ? Go and shoot big game in
Africa? No; he visits the top of the
Monument on a rainy day, or invites
his brother swells to a Punch and Judy
show in his rooms, or rides to White-
chapel and back on an omnibus with a
bag of periwinkles, and picks them out
with a pin.

Even when his humor is at its broad-
est, and he revels in almost pantomimic
fun, he never loses sight of truth and
nature — never strikes a false or uncertain
note. Robinson goes to an evening
party with a spiked knuckle-duster in his
pocket, and sits down. Jones digs an

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

elderly party called Smith in the back
with the point of his umbrella, under the
impression that it is his friend Brown.
A charming little street Arab prints the
soles of his muddy feet on a smart old
gentleman's white evening waistcoat.
Tompkyns writes Henrietta on the sands
under two hearts transfixed by an arrow,
and his wife, whose name is Matilda,
catches him in the act. An old gentle-
man, maddened by a blue -bottle,
smashes all his furniture and breaks
every window-pane but one — where the
blue-bottle is — and in all these scenes
one does not know which is the most
irresistible, the most inimitable, the mere
drollery or the dramatic truth of gesture
and facial expression.

The way in which every-day people
really behave in absurd situations and
under comically trying circumstances is
quite funny enough for him ; and if he

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

exaggerates a little and goes beyond the
absolute prose of life in the direction of
caricature, he never deviates a hair's-
breadth from the groove human nature
has laid down. There is exaggeration,
but no distortion. The most wildly
funny people are low comedians of the
highest order, whose fun is never forced
and never fails ; they found themselves on
fact, and only burlesque what they have
seen in actual life — they never evolve
their fun from the depths of their inner
consciousness; and in this naturalness,
for me, lies the greatness of Leech.
There is nearly always a tenderness in
the laughter he excites, born of the
touch of nature that makes the whole
world kin !

Where most of all he gives us a sense
of the exuberant joyousness and buoy-
ancy of life is in the sketches of the
sea-side — the newly discovered joys of

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

which had then not become common-
place to people of the middle class. The
good old sea-side has grown rather stale
by this time — the very children of to-
day dig and paddle in a half-perfunctory
sort of fashion, with a certain stolidity,
and are in strange contrast to those
highly elate and enchanting little romps
that fill his sea-side pictures.

Indeed, nothing seems so jolly, noth-
ing seems so funny, now, as when Leech
was drawing for Punch. The gayety of
one nation at least has been eclipsed by
his death. Is it merely that there is no
such light humorist to see and draw for
us in a frolicsome spirit all the fun and
the jollity ? Is it because some of us
have grown old ? Or is it that the Brit-
ish people themselves have changed and
gone back to their old way of taking
their pleasure sadly ?

Everything is so different, somehow;
46

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

the very girls themselves have grown a
head taller, and look serious, stately,
and dignified, like Olympian goddesses,
even when they are dancing and playing
lawn-tennis.

I for one should no more dream of
calling them the darlings than I should
dare to kiss them under the mistletoe,
were I ever so splendid a young captain.
Indeed I am too prostrate in admiration
— I can only suck the top of my stick
and gaze in jealous ecstasy, like one of
Leech's little snobs. They are no longer
pretty as their grandmothers were —
whom Leech drew so well in the old
days ! They are beautiful !

And then they are so cultivated, and
know such a lot — of books, of art, of
science, of politics, and theology — of the
world, the flesh, and the devil. They
actually think for themselves ; they have
broken loose and jumped over the ring

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

fence ; they have taken to the water,
these lovely chicks, and swim like duck-
lings, to the dismay of those good old
cocks and hens, their grandparents! And
my love of them is tinged with awe, as
was Leech's love of that mighty, beauti-
ful, but most uncertain quadruped, the
thoroughbred horse — for, like him, when
they are good, they are very, very good,
but when they are bad, they are horrid.
We have changed other things as well :
the swell has become the masher, and is
a terrible dull dog; the poor little snob
has blossomed into a blatant 'Arry, and
no longer wears impossible hats and iron
heels to his boots ; he has risen in the
social scale, and holds his own without
fear or favor in the Park and everywhere
else. To be taken for a haristocrat is
his dream ! Even if he be pelted for it.
In his higher developments he becomes
a " bounder," and bounds away in most
48

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

respectable West End ball-rooms. He
is the only person with any high spirits
left — perhaps that is why high spirits
have gone out of fashion, like box-
ing the watch and wrenching off door-
knockers !

And the snob of our day is quite a
different person, more likely than not
to be found hobnobbing with dukes and
duchesses — as irreproachable in dress
and demeanor as Leech himself. Thack-
eray discovered and christened him for
us long ago ; and he is related to most
of us, and moves in the best society. He
has even ceased to brag of his intimacy
with the great, they have become so
commonplace to him ; and if he swag-
gers at all, it is about his acquaintance
with some popular actor or comic vocal-
ist whom he is privileged to call by his
Christian name.

And those splendid old grandees of

d 49

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

high rank, so imposing of aspect, so
crushing to us poor mortals by mere
virtue not of their wealth and title
alone, but of their high-bred distinction
of feature and bearing — to which Leech
did such ample justice — what has be-
come of them ?

They are like the snows of yester-year!
They have gone the way of their beauti-
ful chariots with the elaborate armorial
bearings and the tasselled hammercloth,
the bewigged, cocked-hatted coachman,
and the two gorgeous flunkies hanging
on behind. Sir Gorgeous Midas has
beaten the dukes in mere gorgeousness,
flunkies and all — burlesqued the vulgar
side of them, and unconsciously shamed
it out of existence ; made swagger and
ostentation unpopular by his own evil
example — actually improved the man-
ners of the great by sheer mimicry of
their defects. He has married his sons
50

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

and his daughters to them and spoiled
the noble curve of those lovely noses
that Leech drew so well, and brought
them down a peg in many ways, and
given them a new lease of life ; and he
has enabled us to discover that they are
not of such different clay from ourselves
after all. All the old slavish formulae
of deference and respect — " Your Grace,"
"Your Ladyship," "My Lord "—that
used to run so glibly off our tongues
whenever we had a chance, are now left
to servants and shopkeepers; and my
slight experience of them, for one, is
that they do not want to be toadied a
bit, and that they are very polite, well-
bred, and most agreeable people.

If we may judge of our modern aris-
tocracy by that very slender fragment
of our contemporary fiction, mostly
American, that still thinks it worth writ-
ing about, our young noble of to-day is
51

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

the most good-humored, tolerant, simple-
hearted, simple-minded, unsophisticated
creature alive — thinking nothing of his
honors — prostrate under the little foot of
some fair Yankee, who is just as likely
as not to jilt him for some transatlantic
painter not yet known to fame.

Compare this unpretending youth to
one of Bulwer's heroes, or Disraeli's, or
even Thackeray's ! And his simple old
duke of a father and his dowdy old duch-
ess of a mother are almost as devoid of
swagger as himself ; they seem to apolo-
gize for their very existence, if we may
trust these American chroniclers who
seem to know them so well ; and I really
think we no longer care to hear and read
about them quite so much as we did —
unless it be in the society papers !

But all these past manners and cus-
toms that some of us can remember so
well — all these obsolete people, from the
52

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

heavily whiskered swell to the policeman
with the leather-bound chimney-pot hat,
from good pater and materfamilias, who
were actually looked up to and obeyed
by their children, to the croquet-playing
darlings in the pork-pie hats and huge
crinolines — all survive and will survive
for many a year in John Leech's pict-
ures of Life and Character.

Except for a certain gentleness, kind-
liness, and self-effacing modesty com-
mon to both, and which made them ap-
pear almost angelic in the eyes of many
who knew them, it would be difficult to
imagine a greater contrast to Leech than
Charles Keene.

Charles Keene was absolutely uncon-
ventional, and even almost eccentric.
He dressed more with a view to artistic
picturesqueness than to fashion, and de-
spised gloves and chimney-pot hats, and
black coats and broadcloth generally.

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

Scotch tweed was good enough for him
in town and country alike. Though a
Tory in politics, he was democratic in
his tastes and habits. He liked to smoke
his short black pipe on the tops of om-
nibuses; he liked to lay and light his
own fire and cook his mutton-chop upon
it. He had a passion for music and a
beautiful voice, and sang with a singular
pathos and charm, but he preferred the
sound of his bagpipes to that of his own
singing, and thought that you must pre-
fer it too !

He was forever sketching in pen
and ink, in-doors and out — he used at
one time to carry a little ink-bottle at
his button-hole, and steel pens in his
waistcoat-pocket, and thus equipped he
would sketch whatever took his fancy in
his walks abroad — houses, 'busses, cabs,
people — bits of street and square, scaf-
foldings, boardings with advertisements
54

in a photograph by Elliott and Fry, London.
CHARLES KEENE

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

— sea, river, moor, lake, and mountain —
what has he not sketched with that mas-
terly pen that had already been so care-
fully trained by long and arduous prac-
tice in a life-school? His heart was in
his work from first to last ; beyond his
bagpipes and his old books (for he was a
passionate reader), he seemed to have
no other hobby. His facility in sketch-
ing became phenomenal, as also his
knowledge of what to put in and what
to leave out, so that the effect he aimed
at should be secured in perfection and
with the smallest appearance of labor.

Among his other gifts he had a phys-
ical gift of inestimable value for such
work as ours — namely, a splendid hand
— a large, muscular, well -shaped, and
most workman -like hand, whose long
deft fingers could move with equal ease
and certainty in all directions. I have
seen it at work — and it was a pleasure
55

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

to watch its acrobatic dexterity, its un-
erring precision of touch. It could draw
with nonchalant facility parallel straight
lines, or curved, of just the right thick-
ness and distance from each other — al-
most as regular as if they had been
drawn with ruler or compass — almost,
but not quite. The quiteness would
have made them mechanical, and robbed
them of their charm of human handi-
craft. A cunning and obedient slave,
this wonderful hand, for which no com-
mand from the head could come amiss —
a slave, moreover, that had most thor-
oughly learned its business by long ap-
prenticeship to one especial trade, like
the head and like the eye that guided it.
Leech no doubt had a good natural
hand, that swept about with enviable
freedom and boldness, but for want of
early discipline it could not execute
these miracles of skill ; and the com-
56

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

mands that came from the head also
lacked the preciseness which results
from patiently acquired and well-digest-
ed knowledge, so that Mr. Hand was
apt now and then to zigzag a little on
its own account — in backgrounds, on
floors and walls, under chairs and tables,
whenever a little tone was felt to be de-
sirable— sometimes in the shading of
coats and trousers and ladies' dresses.

But it never took a liberty with a hu-
man face or a horse's head ; and when-
ever it went a little astray you could al-
ways read between the lines and know
exactly what it meant.

There is no difficulty in reading be-
tween Keene's lines ; every one of them
has its unmistakable definite intimation ;
every one is the right line in the right
place !

We must remember that there are no
such things as lines in nature. Whether
57

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

we use them to represent a human pro-
file, the depth of a shadow, the darkness
of a cloak or a thunder-cloud, they are
mere conventional symbols. They were
invented a long time ago, by a distin-
guished sportsman who was also a
heaven-born amateur artist — the John
Leech of his day — who engraved for us
(from life) the picture of a mammoth on
one of its own tusks.

And we have accepted them ever since
as the cheapest and simplest way of in-
terpreting in black and white for the
wood-engraver the shapes and shadows
and colors of nature. They may be
scratchy, feeble, and uncertain, or firm
and bold — thick and thin — straight,
curved, parallel, or irregular — cross-
hatched once, twice, a dozen times, at
any angle — every artist has his own way
of getting his effect. But some ways
are better than others, and I think
58

in
2,

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£*■

5 5. 3

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

Keene's is the firmest, loosest, simplest
and best way that ever was, and — the
most difficult to imitate. His mere pen-
strokes have, for the expert, a beauty
and an interest quite apart from the
thing they are made to depict, whether
he uses them as mere outlines to express
the shape of things animate or inanimate,
even such shapeless, irregular things as
the stones on a sea-beach — or in com-
bination to suggest the tone and color
of a dress-coat, or a drunkard's nose, of
a cab or omnibus — of a distant moun-
tain with miles of atmosphere between
it and the figures in the foreground.

His lines are as few as can be — he is
most economical in this respect and
loves to leave as much white paper as he
can ; but one feels in his best work that
one line more or one line less would
impair the perfection of the whole —
that of all the many directions, curves,
59

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

and thicknesses they might have taken
he has inevitably hit upon just the right
one. He has beaten all previous rec-
ords in this respect — in this country, at
least. I heard a celebrated French
painter say: " He is a great man, your
Charles Keene ; he take a pen and ink
and a bit of paper, and wiz a half-dozen
strokes he know 'ow to frame a gust of
wind !" I think myself that Leech
could frame a gust of wind as effectually
as Keene, by the sheer force of his un-
taught natural instinct — of his genius;
but not with the deftness — this economy
of material — this certainty of execution
— this consummate knowledge of effect.
To borrow a simile from music, there
are certain tunes so fresh and sweet and
pretty that they please at once and for-
ever, like " Home, Sweet Home," or
" The Last Rose of Summer "; they go
straight to the heart of the multitude,
60

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

however slight the accompaniment — a
few simple chords — they hardly want an
accompaniment at all.

Leech's art seems to me of just such
a happy kind : he draws — I mean he
scores like an amateur who has not
made a very profound study of harmony,
and sings his pretty song to his simple
accompaniment with so sweet and true
a natural voice that we are charmed. It
is the magic of nature, whereas Keene
is a very Sebastian Bach in his counter-
point. There is nothing of the amateur
about him ; his knowledge of harmony
in black and white is complete and thor-
ough ; mere consummate scoring has
become to him a second nature ; each
separate note of his voice reveals the
long training of the professional singer ;
and if his tunes are less obviously sweet
and his voice less naturally winning and
sympathetic than Leech's, his aesthetic

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

achievement is all the greater. It is to
his brother artists rather than to the
public at large that his most successful
appeal is made — but with an intensity
that can only be gained by those who
have tried in vain to do what he has
done, and who thereby know how diffi-
cult it is. His real magic is that of art.
This perhaps accounts for the unmis-
takable fact that Leech's popularity has
been so much greater than Keene's, and
I believe is still. Leech's little melodies
of the pencil (to continue the parallel
with the sister art) are like Volkslieder —
national airs — and more directly reach
the national heart. Transplant them to
other lands that have pencil Volkslieder
of their own (though none, I think, com-
parable to his for fun and sweetness and
simplicity) and they fail to please as
much, while their mere artistic qualities
are not such as to find favor among for-
62

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SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

eign experts, whereas Keene actually
gains by such a process. He is as much
admired by the artists of France and Ger-
many as by our own — if not more. For
some of his shortcomings, such as his
lack of feeling for English female beauty,
his want of perception, perhaps his dis-
dain, of certain little eternal traits and
conventions and differences that stamp
the various grades of our social hierarchy,
do not strike them, and nothing inter-
feres with their complete appreciation
of his craftsmanship.

Perhaps, also, Leech's frequent verifi-
cation of our manly British pluck and
honesty, and proficiency in sport, and
wholesomeness and cleanliness of body
and mind, our general physical beauty
and distinction, and his patriotic ten-
dency to contrast our exclusive posses-
sion of these delightful gifts with the
deplorable absence of them in any coun-
63

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

try but our own, may fail to enlist the
sympathies of the benighted foreigner.

Whereas there is not much to humili-
ate the most touchy French or German
reader of Punch, or excite his envy, in
Charles Keene's portraiture of our race.
He is impartial and detached, and the
most rabid Anglophobe may frankly ad-
mire him without losing his self-esteem.
The English lower middle class and
people, that Keene has depicted with
such judicial freedom from either prej-
udice or prepossession, have many vir-
tues; but they are not especially con-
spicuous for much vivacity or charm
of aspect or gainliness of demeanor ;
and he has not gone out of his way to
idealize them.

Also, he seldom if ever gibes at those
who have not been able to resist the
temptations (as Mr. Gilbert would say)
of belonging to other nations.
64

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

Thus in absolute craftsmanship and
technical skill, in the ease and beauty of
his line, his knowledge of effect, his com-
plete mastery over the material means
at his disposal, Charles Keene seems to
me as superior to Leech as Leech is to
him in grace, in human naturalness and
geniality of humor, in accurate observa-
tion of life, in keenness of social percep-
tion, and especially in width of range.

The little actors on Leech's stage are
nearly all of them every-day people —
types one is constantly meeting. High
or low, tipsy or sober, vulgar or refined,
pleasant or the reverse, we knew them
all before Leech ever drew them; and our
recognition of them on his page is full
of delight at meeting old familiar friends
and seeing them made fun of for our
amusement.

Whereas a great many of Keene's mid-
dle-class protagonists are peculiar and

E 65

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

exceptional, and much of their humor
lies in their eccentricity ; they are char-
acters themselves, rather than types of
English characters. Are they really
observed and drawn from life, do they
really exist just as they are, or are they
partly evolved from the depths of an in-
ner consciousness that is not quite satis-
fied with life just as it is ?

They are often comic, with their ex-
quisitely drawn faces so full of subtlety —
intensely comic ! Their enormous per-
plexities about nothing, their utter guile-
lessness, their innocence of the wicked
world and its ways, make them engaging
sometimes in spite of a certain ungain-
liness of gesture, dress, and general be-
havior that belongs to them, and which
delighted Charles Keene, who was the
reverse of ungainly, just as the oft-recur-
ring tipsiness of his old gentlemen de-
lighted him, though he was the most ab-
66

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

stemious of men. I am now speaking
of his middle-class people — those won-
derful philistines of either sex ; those
elaborately capped and corpulent old
ladies; those mutton-chop- whiskered,
middle-aged gentlemen with long upper
lips and florid complexions, receding
chins, noses almost horizontal in their
prominence ; those artless damsels who
trouble themselves so little about the
latest fashions; those feeble-minded,
hirsute swells with the sloping shoulders
and the broad hips and the little hats
cocked on one side ; those unkempt,
unspoiled, unspotted from the world
brothers of the brush, who take in their
own milk, and so complacently ignore
all the rotten conventionalism of our
over-civilized existence.

When he takes his subjects from the
classes beneath these, he is, if not quite
so funny, at his best, I think. His cos-
67

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

termongers and policemen, his omnibus
drivers and conductors and cabbies, are
inimitable studies; and as for his 'busses
and cabs, I really cannot find words to
express my admiration of them. In
these, as in his street scenes and land-
scapes, he is unapproached and unap-
proachable.

Nor must we forget his canny Scots-
men, his Irish laborers and peasants, his
splendid English navvies, and least of all
his volunteers — he and Leech might be
called the pillars of the volunteer move-
ment, from the manner, so true, so sym-
pathetic, and so humorous, in which
they have immortalized its beginning.

Charles Keene is seldom a satirist.
His nature was too tolerant and too
sweet for hate, and that makes him a bad
and somewhat perfunctory hater. He
tries to hate 'Any, but he can't, for he
draws an ideal 'Any that surely never

"NONE O' YOUR LARKS "

Gigantic Navvy. " Let's walk between yer, Gents: folks '11 think you've took
up a Deserter."— Pimch, October 19, 1861.

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

was, and thus his shaft misses the mark ;
compare his 'Any to one of Leech's
snobs, for instance ! He tries to hate
the haw-haw swell, and is equally un-
successful. When you hate and can
draw, you can draw what you hate down
to its minutest details — better, perhaps,
than what you love — so that whoever
runs and reads and looks at your pict-
ures hates with you.

Who ever hated a personage of Keene's
beyond that feeble kind of aversion that
comes from mere uncongeniality, a
slightly offended social taste, or prej-
udice ? One feels a mere indulgent and
half-humorous disdain, but no hate. On
the other hand, I do not think that we
love his personages very much — we
stand too much outside his eccentric
world for sympathy. From the pencil
of this most lovable man, with his
unrivalled power of expressing all he
69

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

saw and thought, I cannot recall many
lovable characters of either sex or any
age. Here and there a good-natured
cabby, a jolly navvy, a simple-minded
flautist or bagpiper, or a little street
Arab, like the small boy who pointed
out the jail doctor to his pal and said,
" That's my medical man."

Whereas Leech's pages teem with
winning, graceful, lovable types, and
here and there a hateful one to give
relief.

But, somehow, one liked the man who
drew these strange people, even without
knowing him ; when you knew him you
loved him very much — so much that no
room was left in you for envy of his un-
attainable mastery in his art. For of
this there can be no doubt — no greater
or more finished master in black and
white has devoted his life to the illustra-
tion of the manners and humors of his
70

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

time ; and if Leech is even greater than
he, and I for one am inclined to think
he is, it is not as an artist, but as a stu-
dent and observer of human nature, as a
master of the light, humorous, superficial
criticism of life.

Charles Keene died of general atrophy-
on January 4, 1 89 1. It was inexpres-
sibly pathetic to see how patiently, how
resignedly, he wasted away ; he retained
his unalterable sweetness to the last.

His handsome, dark-skinned face, so
strongly lined and full of character ; his
mild and magnificent light -gray eyes,
that reminded one of a St. Bernard's ;
his tall, straight, slender aspect, that re-
minded one of Don Quixote ; his sim-
plicity of speech and character ; his love
of humor, and the wonderful smile that
lit up his face when he heard a good
story, and the still more wonderful wink
of his left eye when he told one — all
71

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

these will remain strongly impressed
on the minds of those who ever met
him.

I attended his funeral as I had attend-
ed Leech's twenty - six years before ;
Canon Ainger, a common friend of us
both, performed the service. It was a
bitterly cold day, which accounted for
the sparseness of the mourners compared
to the crowd that was present on the
former occasion ; but bearing in mind
that all those present were either rela-
tions or old friends, all of them with the
strongest and deepest personal regard
for the friend we had lost, the attend-
ance seemed very large indeed ; and all
of us, I think, in our affectionate remem-
brance of one of the most singularly
sweet-natured, sweet-tempered, and sim-
ple-hearted men that ever lived, forgot
for the time that a very great artist was
being laid to his rest.
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And now, in fulfilment of my contract,
I must speak of myself — a difficult and
not very grateful task. One's self is a
person about whom one knows too much
and too little — about whom we can
never hit a happy medium. Sometimes
one rates one's self too high, sometimes
(but less frequently) too low, according
to the state of our digestion, our spirits,
our pocket, or even the weather !

In the present instance I will say all
the good of myself I can decently, and
leave all the rating to you. It is inev-
itable, however unfortunate it may be
for me, that I should be compared with
my two great predecessors, Leech and
Keene, whom I have just been compar-
ing to each other.

When John Leech's mantle fell from
his shoulders it was found that the gar-
ment was ample to clothe the naked-
ness of more than one successor.

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

John Tenniel had already, it is true,
replaced him for several years as the
political cartoonist of Punch. How ad-
mirably he has always filled that post,
then and ever since, and how great his
fame is, I need not speak of here. Lin-
ley Sambourne and Harry Furniss, so
different from each other and from Ten-
niel, have also, since then, brought their
great originality and their unrivalled skill
to the political illustrations of Punch —
Sambourne to the illustration of many
other things in it besides, but which do
not strictly belong to the present subject.

I am here concerned with the social
illustrators alone, and, besides, only with
those who have made the sketches of
social subjects in Punch the principal
business of their lives. For very many
artists, from Sir John Millais, Sir John
Gilbert, Frederick Walker, and Ran-
dolph Caldecott downward, have con-

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

tributed to that fortunate periodical at
one time or another, and not a few dis-
tinguished amateurs.

Miss Georgina Bowers, Mr. Corbould,
and others have continued the fox-hunt-
ing tradition, and provided those scenes
which have become a necessity to the
sporting readers of Punch.

To Charles Keene was fairly left that
part of the succession that was most to
his taste — the treatment of life in the
street and the open country, in the shops
and parlors of the lower middle class,
and the homes of the people.

And to me were allotted the social and
domestic dramas, the nursery, the school-
room, the dining and drawing rooms,
and croquet -lawns of the more or less
well-to-do.

I was particularly told not to try to
be broadly funny, but to undertake the
light and graceful business, like zjeune
75

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

premier. I was, in short, to be the
tenor, or rather the tenorino, of that
little company for which Mr. Punch
beats time with his immortal baton, and
to warble in black and white such mel-
odies as I could evolve from my con-
templations of the gentler aspect of
English life, while Keene, with his mag-
nificent, highly trained basso, sang the
comic songs.

We all became specialized, so to
speak, and divided Leech's vast domain
among us.

We kicked a little at first, I remember,
and whenever (to continue the musical
simile) I could get in a comic song, or
what I thought one, or some queer fan-
tastic ditty about impossible birds and
hearts and fishes and what not, I did not
let the opportunity slip ; while Keene,
who had a very fine falsetto on the top
of his chest register, would now and
76

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

then warble, pianissimo, some little bal-
lad of the drawing-room or nursery.

But gradually we settled into our re-
spective grooves, and I have grown to
like my little groove very much, nar-
row though it be — a poor thing, but
mine own !

Moreover, certain physical disabilities
that I have the misfortune to labor un-
der make it difficult for me to study and
sketch the lusty things in the open air
and sunshine. My sight, besides being
defective in many ways, is so sensitive
that I cannot face the common light of
day without glasses thickly rimmed with
wire gauze, so that sketching out-of-
doors is often to me a difficult and
distressing performance. That is also
partly why I am not a sportsman and a
delineator of sport.

I mention this infirmity not as an ex-
cuse for my shortcomings and failures —
77

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

for them there is no excuse — but as a
reason why I have abstained from the
treatment of so much that is so popular,
delightful, and exhilarating in English
country life.

If there had been no Charles Keene
(a terrible supposition both for Punch
and its readers), I should have done my
best to illustrate the lower walks and
phases of London existence, which at-
tract me as much as any other. It is
just as easy to draw a costermonger or
a washer-woman as it is a gentleman or
lady — perhaps a little easier — but it is
by no means so easy to draw them as
Keene did ! And to draw a cab or an
omnibus after him (though I have some-
times been obliged to do so) is almost
tempting Providence !

If there had been no Charles Keene,
I might, perhaps, with practice, have be-
come a funny man myself — though I do
78

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SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

not suppose that my fun would have
ever been of the broadest !

Before I became an artist I was con-
sidered particularly good at caricaturing
my friends, who always foresaw for me
more than one change of profession, and
Punch as the final goal of my wander-
ings in search of a career. For it was
originally intended that I should be a
man of science.

Dr. Williamson, the eminent chemist
and professor of chemistry, told me not
long ago that he remembers caricatures
that I drew, now forty years back, when
I was studying under him at the Labor-
atory of Chemistry at University College,
and that he and other grave and rever-
end professors were hugely tickled by
them at the time. Indeed he remembers
nothing else about me, except that I
promised to be a very bad chemist.

I was a very bad chemist indeed, but

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

not for long ! As soon as I was free to
do as I pleased, I threw up test-tubes
and crucibles and went back to Paris,
where I was born and brought up, and
studied to become an artist in M.
Gleyre's studio. Then I went to Ant-
werp, where there is a famous school of
painting, and where I had no less a per-
son than Mr. Alma-Tadema as a fellow-
student. It was all delightful, but mis-
fortune befell me, and I lost the sight
of one eye — perhaps it was the eye with
which I used to do the funny carica-
tures ; it was a very good eye, much the
better of the two, and the other has not
improved by having to do a double
share of the work.

And then in time I came to England
and drew for Punch, thus fulfilling the
early prophecy of my friends and fellow-
students at University College — though
not quite in the sense they anticipated.
80

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

I will not attempt a description of my
work — it is so recent and has been so
widely circulated that it should be un-
necessary to do so. If you do not
remember it, it is that it is not worth
remembering ; if you do, I can only en-
treat you to be to my faults a little
blind, and to my virtues very kind !

I have always tried as honestly and
truthfully as lies in me to serve up to the
readers of Punch whatever I have culled
with the bodily eye, after cooking it
a little in the brain. My raw material
requires more elaborate working than
Leech's. He dealt more in flowers and
fruits and roots, if I may express myself
so figuratively — from the lordly pineap-
ple and lovely rose, down to the hum-
ble daisy and savory radish. / deal in
vegetables, I suppose. Little that I ever
find seems to me fit for the table just as
I see it ; morever, by dishing it up raw

F 81

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SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

I should offend many people and make
many enemies, and deserve to do so. I
cook my green pease, asparagus, French
beans, Brussels sprouts, German sauer-
kraut, and even a truffle now and then,
so carefully that you would never rec-
ognize them as they were when I first
picked them in the social garden. And
they do not recognize themselves! Or
even each other !

And I do my best to dish them up in
good, artistic style. O that I could ar-
range for you a truffle with all that
culinary skill that Charles Keene brought
to the mere boiling of a carrot or a po-
tato ! He is the cordon bleu par excel-
lence. The people I meet seem to me
more interesting than funny — so in-
teresting that I am well content to
draw them as I see them, after just a
little arrangement and a very transpar-
ent disguise — and without any attempt
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at caricature. The better looking they
are, the more my pencil loves them, and
I feel more inclined to exaggerate in
this direction than in any other.

Sam Weller, if you recollect, was fond
of "pootiness and wirtue." I so agree
with him ! I adore them both, especial-
ly in women and children. I only wish
that the wirtue was as easy to draw as
the pootiness.

But indeed for me — speaking as an
artist, and also, perhaps, a little bit as a
man — pootiness is almost a wirtue in it-
self. I don't think I shall ever weary of
trying to depict it, from its dawn in the
toddling infant to its decline and set-
ting and long twilight in the beautiful
old woman, who has known how to grow
old gradually. I like to surround it with
chivalrous and stalwart manhood ; and
it is a standing grievance to me that I
have to clothe all this masculine escort
83

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

in coats and trousers and chimney-pot
hats ; worse than all, in the evening dress
of the period! — that I cannot surround
my divinity with a guard of honor more
worthily arrayed !

Thus, of all my little piebald puppets
the one I value the most is my pretty
woman. I am as fond of her as Leech
was of his ; of whom, by-the-way, she is
the granddaughter ! This is not artistic
vanity ; it is pure paternal affection, and
by no means prevents me from seeing
her faults ; it only prevents me from
seeing them as clearly as you do !

Please be not very severe on her, for
her grandmother's sake. Words fail me
to express how much I loved her grand-
mother, who wore a cricket -cap and
broke Aunt Sally's nose seven times.

Will my pretty woman ever be all I
wish her to be? All she ought to be?
I fear not !

FELINE AMENITIES

"I wish you hadn't asked Captain Wareham, Lizzie. Horrid man \ I
can't bear him !"

"Dear me, Charlotte— isn't the World big enough for you both?"
"Yes; but your little Dining-room isn't I"— Punch, February 16, 1889.

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

On the mantel-piece in my studio at
home there stands a certain lady. She
is but lightly clad, and what simple gar-
ment she wears is not in the fashion of
our day. How well I know her ! Al-
most thoroughly by this time — for she
has been the silent companion of my
work for thirty years! She has lost
both her arms and one of her feet,
which I deplore ; and also the tip of her
nose, but that has been made good !

She is only three feet high, or there-
abouts, and quite two thousand years
old, or more ; but she is ever young —

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety !" —

and a very giantess in beauty. For she
is a reduction in plaster of the famous
statue of the Louvre.

They call her the Venus of Milo, or
Melos ! It is a calumny — a libel. She
85

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

is no Venus, except in good looks ; and
if she errs at all, it is on the side of aus-
terity. She is not only pootiness, but
wirtue incarnate (if one can be incarnate
in marble), from the crown of her lovely
head to the sole of her remaining foot —
a very beautiful foot, though by no means
a small one — it has never worn a high-
heel shoe !

Like all the best of its kind, and its
kind the best, she never sates nor palls,
and the more I look at her the more I
see to love and worship — and, alas, the
more dissatisfied I feel — not indeed with
the living beauty, ripe and real, that I
see about and around — mere life is such
a beauty in itself that no stone ideal
can ever hope to match it ! But dissatis-
fied with the means at my command to
do the living beauty justice — a little bit
of paper, a steel pen, and a bottle of ink
— and, alas, fingers and an eye less skilled

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

than they would have been if I had gone
straight to a school of art instead of a
laboratory for chemistry !

And now for social pictorial satire con-
sidered as a fine art.

They who have practised it hither-
to, from Hogarth downward, have not
been many — you can count their names
on your fingers ! And the wide popular-
ity they have won may be due as much
to their scarcity as to the interest we all
take in having the mirror held up to our-
selves— to the malicious pleasure we all
feel at seeing our neighbors held up to
gentle ridicule or well - merited reproof ;
most of all, perhaps, to the realistic charm
that lies in all true representation of the
social aspects with which we are most
familiar, ugly as these are often apt to
be, with our chimney-pot hats and trou-
sers, that unfit us, it seems, for serious
and elaborate pictorial treatment at the
87

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

hands of the foremost painters of our
own times — except when we sit to them
for our portraits ; then they have willy-
nilly to make the best of us, just as
we are !

The plays and novels that succeed
the most are those which treat of the
life of our own day ; not so the costly
pictures we hang upon our walls. We
do not care to have continually before
our eyes elaborate representations of
the life we lead every day and all day
long; we like best that which rather
takes us out of it — romantic or graceful
episodes of another time or clime, when
men wore prettier clothes than they do
now — well-imagined, well-painted scenes
from classic lore — historical subjects —
subjects selected from our splendid
literature and what not ; or, if we want
modern subjects, we prefer scenes chosen
from a humble sphere, which is not

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that of those who can afford to buy
pictures — the toilers of the earth —
the toilers of the sea — pathetic scenes
from the inexhaustible annals of the
poor ; or else, again, landscapes and
seascapes — things that bring a whiff of
nature into our feverish and artificial
existence — that are in direct contrast
to it.

And even with these beautiful things,
how often the charm wears away with
the novelty of possession ! How often
and how soon the lovely picture, like its
frame, becomes just as a piece of wall-
furniture, in which we take a pride, cer-
tainly, and which we should certainly
miss if it were taken away — but which
we grow to look at with the pathetic
indifference of habit — if not, indeed,
with aversion !

Chairs and tables minister to our
physical comforts, and we cannot do
89

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

without them. But pictures have not
this practical hold upon us; the sense
to which they appeal is not always on
the alert ; yet there they are hanging
on the wall, morning, noon, and night,
unchanged, unchangeable — the same
arrested movement — the same expres-
sion of face — the same seas and trees
and moors and forests and rivers and
mountains — the very waves are as eter-
nal as the hills !

Music will leave off when it is not
wanted — at least it ought to ! The book
is shut, the newspaper thrown aside.
Not so the beautiful picture ; it is like a
perennial nosegay, forever exhaling its
perfume for noses that have long ceased
to smell it !

But little pictures in black and white,

of little every-day people like ourselves,

by some great little artist who knows

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SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

mand to express his knowledge in this
easy, simple manner, can be taken up
and thrown down like the book or news-
paper. They are even easier to read
and understand. They are within the
reach of the meanest capacity, the hum-
blest education, the most slender purse.
They come to us weekly, let us say, in
cheap periodicals. They are preserved
and bound up in volumes, to be taken
down and looked at when so disposed.
The child grows to love them before he
knows how to read ; fifty years hence he
will love them still, if only for the pleas-
ure they gave him as a child. He will
soon know them by heart, and yet go
to them again and again ; and if they
are good, he will always find new beau-
ties and added interest as he himself
grows in taste and culture ; and how
much of that taste and culture he will
owe to them, who can say ?
91

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

Nothing sticks so well in the young
mind as a little picture one can hold
close to the eyes like a book — not even
a song or poem — for in the case of most
young people the memory of the eye is
better than that of the ear — its power of
assimilating more rapid and more keen.
And then there is the immense variety,
the number !

Our pictorial satirist taking the great-
est pains, doing his very best, can pro-
duce, say, a hundred of these little pict-
ures in a twelvemonth, while his elder
brother of the brush bestows an equal
labor and an equal time on one impor-
tant canvas, which will take another
twelvemonth to engrave, perhaps, for
the benefit of those fortunate enough to
be able to afford the costly engraving
of that one priceless work of art, which
only one millionaire can possess at a
time. Happy millionaire ; happy painter
92

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SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

— just as likely as not to become a mill-
ionaire himself ! And this elder broth-
er of the brush will be the first to ac-
knowledge his little brother's greatness
— if the little brother's work be well
done. You should hear how the first
painters of our time, here and abroad,
express themselves about Charles
Keene ! They do not speak of him as
a little brother, I tell you, but a very
big brother indeed.

Thackeray, for me, and many others,
the greatest novelist, satirist, humorist
of our time, where so many have been
great, is said to have at the beginning
of his career wished to illustrate the
books of others — Charles Dickens's, I
believe, for one. Fortunately, perhaps,
for us and for him, and perhaps for
Dickens, he did not succeed ; he lived to
write books of his own, and to illus-
trate them himself ; and it is generally
93

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

admitted that his illustrations, clever
as they are, were not up to the mark
of his writings.

It was not his natural mode of expres-
sion— and I doubt if any amount of
training and study would have made it
a successful mode ; the love of the thing
does not necessarily carry the power to
do it. That he loved it he has shown
us in many ways, and also that he was
always practising it. Most of my hear-
ers will remember his beautiful ballad of
" The Pen and the Album "—

" I am my master's faithful old gold pen.
I've served him three long years, and drawn

since then
Thousands of funny women and droll

men." . . .

Now conceive — it is not an impossible

conception — that the marvellous gift of

expression that he was to possess in

REFINEMENTS OF MODERN SPEECH
(Scene — A Drawing-room in "Passionate Brampton.")
Fair Esthetic {suddenly, and in deepest tones to Smith,

who has just been introduced to take her in to Dinner). " Are

you Intense ?" — Punch, June 14, 1879.

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

words had been changed by some fairy
at his birth into an equal gift of expres-
sion by means of the pencil, and that he
had cultivated the gift as assiduously as
he cultivated the other, and finally that
he had exercised it as sedulously through
life, bestowing on innumerable little pict-
ures in black and white all the wit and
wisdom, the wide culture, the deep
knowledge of the world and of the hu-
man heart, all the satire, the tenderness,
the drollery, and last, but not least, that
incomparable perfection of style that
we find in all or most that he has writ-
ten— what a pictorial record that would
be!

Think of it — a collection of little
wood-cuts or etchings, with each its
appropriate legend — a series of small
pictures equal in volume and in value
to the whole of Thackeray's literary
work ! Think of the laughter and the
95

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

tears from old and young, rich and poor,
and from the thousands who have not
the intelligence or the culture to ap-
preciate great books, or lack time or
inclination to read them.

All there was in the heart and mind
of Thackeray, expressed through a me-
dium so simple and direct that even
a child could be made to feel it, or a
chimney-sweep! For where need we
draw the line ? We are only pretending.

Now I am quite content with Thack-
eray as he is — a writer of books, whose
loss to literature could not be compen-
sated by any gain to the gentle art of
drawing little figures in black and white
— " thousands of funny women and droll
men." All I wish to point out, in these
days when drawing is pressed into the
service of daily journalism, and with
such success that there will soon be as
many journalists with the pencil as with
96

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

the pen, is this, that the career of the
future social pictorial satirist is full of
splendid possibilities undreamed-of yet.

It is a kind of hybrid profession still
in its infancy — hardly recognized as a
profession at all — something half-way
between literature and art — yet poten-
tially combining all that is best and most
essential in both, and appealing as effec-
tively as either to some of our strongest
needs and most natural instincts.

• It has no school as yet ; its methods
are tentative, and its few masters have
been pretty much self-taught. But I
think that a method and a school will
evolve themselves by degrees — are per-
haps evolving themselves already.

The quality of black and white illus-
trations of modern life is immeasurably
higher than it was thirty or forty years
ago — its average and artistic quality —
and it is getting higher day by day.
g 97

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

The number of youths who can draw
beautifully is quite appalling; one would
think they had learned to draw be-
fore learning to read and write. Why
shouldn't they?

Well, all we want, for my little dream
to be realized, is that among these pre-
cocious wielders of the pencil there
should arise here a Dickens, there a
Thackeray, there a George Eliot or an
Anthony Trollope, who, finding quite
early in life that he can draw as easily
as other men can spell, that he can ex-
press himself, and all that he hears and
sees and feels, more easily, more com-
pletely, in that way than in any other,
will devote himself heart and soul to
that form of expression — as I and oth-
ers have tried to do — but with advan-
tages of nature, circumstances, and edu-
cation that have been denied to us !

Hogarth seems to have come nearer
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SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

to this ideal pictorial satirist than any
of his successors in Punch and elsewhere.
For he was not merely a light humorist
and a genial caricaturist ; he dealt also
in pathos and terror, in tragic passion
and sorrow and crime; he often strikes
chords of too deep a tone for the pages
of a comic periodical.

But the extent of his productiveness
was limited by the method of his pro-
duction ; he was a great painter in oils,
and each of his life scenes is an impor-
tant and elaborate picture, which, more-
over, he engraved himself at great cost
of time and labor, after the original time
and labor spent in painting it. It is by
these engravings, far more than by his
pictures, that he is so widely known.

It is quite possible to conceive a little

sketchy wood-cut no larger than a cut

in Punch, and drawn by a master like

Charles Keene, or the German Adolf

SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE

Mensel, giving us all the essence of any
picture by Hogarth even more effective-
ly, more agreeably, than any of Ho-
garth's most finished engravings. And
if this had been Hogarth's method of
work, instead of some fifty or sixty of
those immortal designs we should have
had some five or six thousand! Almost
a library !

So much for the great pictorial satir-
ist of the future — of the near future, let
us hope — that I have been trying to
evolve from my inner consciousness.
May some of us live to see him !

THE END

HARPER'S AMERICAN ESSAYISTS.

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BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY

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